Cards

Some Tips for Effectvely using "Cards".

At the end of the day, your users will log time against the Clients, Projects, etc. selected in your filter criteria. Cards can be thought of as ways to bookmark or save filter sets so that you can easily switch from one Project (for instance) to another. Selecting a card on the Log Time tab switches the filters to match those of the selecetd card. So, in a sense, users can log time against a card. (A card is also selected when you click the “edit” button beside that card).

Selecting Cards and Filters You can select a card by clicking anywhere on the card’s row. The list of cards can be filtered to show just active cards, and again to show just cards for one client. Once you select a card, the label of the filters section changes to read “Filters for Selected Card” followed by the card name. This label will persist as log as the filters match the selected card. Should you change the filters away from the selected card, the label will change to read “Filters (no longer match selected card)”. Note that you can still log time against the filters in this case. Finally, if no card is selected, the filters label changes to read “Filters.” Note that cards remain selected (and filter criteria remain in effect) even if the cards or filters section of the softwre is hidden using the green open/close buttons to the left of each section.

What do Cards add to Filters? Cards can have two properties in addition to the filters associated with the card. You may assign a default rate to the card; rates are then looked up into any time logged against the card. You can also assign a default billable status to a card so that all time logged against the card is either billable or not billable. Since you can also mark cards as billed or not and manage their “active” status, cards give yiou a way to aggregate your logged time into more manageable chuncks.

Using Cards to Restrict Access by User (Some of this will not apply to the single use version of CC Time) You can use cards to restrict who is allowed to log time on which projects.This involves removing the checkbox at the top of the Log Time tab which allows users to click “show all cards”. You’d then set the value of this setting field (FilterAllCardsGlob) to zero or blank when non-administrative users log in. With this field so set, users can only see the cards that they have been assigned to. Naturally you’d also want to add some passwords to this system and add some kind of trap to the “edit” button in the cards portal so that non-admin users could not change which users were assigned to each card. You’d want to put similar limits on the New Card routine. You’d also need to limit access to the filters in such a way that users could not log time if the filters had been set to deviate from the selected card. This is easiy done by editing the “ Test for Additional Criteria” script in CC Time. Simply replace the IF statement beginning that script with the following calc and then add your own comments to the error message: “Filters::FiltersMatchCardCalcGlob ? 1” This tests to see if the filters have been changed from matching the selected card. You could also just remove the fiters section from the screen(s) on which non admin users log time.

Using Cards to Retrict Access by Dates Once you’re forcing usings to log time against cards instead of setting the filters however they wish (as described at the end of the preceeding paragraph), you can use the cards filter dates restrict time logging by date. For instannce, if you have to bill a certain project every month, you could set up cards for that project that run for one month at a time. At the end of the month you can safely bill each card knowing that users are now forced to log time on the necxt month’s card. You can of course use the card’s “Active” status to accomplish much the same thing.

Creating Reports Only Cards One nice thing about cards is that you can create cards that are just used for reporting, not for logging time. While you may have specific cards set up to log time against different phases of a project, you can have reporting cards set up to keep track of the project as a whole.

Using Cards for Partial Billling Since it can sometimes be hard to do a lot of partial billing against a long project, you can use cards to make this easier. Let’s say you have a card for a big project. When you need to bill your work todate, you can edit that card by adding a date range from the beginning of the project through the date of your first partial bill. You can then mark that whole card as “billed” and create a new card for the project starting on the next day and going forward (until the end of the year, for instance). In this way you’re creating cards that match each of your invoices as those invoices are created.

If I've billed everything on a card, will the card automatically be marked "billed"?